cover image GeNtry!fication: or the scene of the crime

GeNtry!fication: or the scene of the crime

Chaun Webster. Noemi, $15 trade paper (88p) ISBN 978-1-934819-73-9

Poet and graphic designer Webster’s impressive debut foregrounds innovation in language and design to consider the stakes of legibility for black disposable subjects of a colonial enterprise and to chronicle the struggles of a North Minneapolis beset by gentrification and racism. In “Ntro,” Webster invokes a lineage of black critical thinkers and artists as source material referenced throughout the book: “Lorde taught you. Baraka too. About being out.” These reference poems alternate with attention-grabbing typographical experiments that play with erasure and redaction, such as the full-page layering of the phrase “this is not a black out.” In “forbidDIN,” Webster sets out the project’s main conceit via a poem that mimics a dictionary entry turned typographical experiment. To make a din—“a loud, unpleasant, and prolonged voice”—is also to make discourse. While “the negroes made a forbidDIN and awful noise,” as Webster writes, a typographical din dominates the page as a large, black, barely legible mass. In pushing the boundaries of the poetry book as form, Webster aims to “speculate an other world./ one repossessed/ from some discarded archive/ organized into existence.” Though the narrative changes page by page, as if more committed to eluding capture than to comprehension, Webster’s excavation and engagement with a global black diasporic tradition covers crucial new poetic ground. (Apr.)